RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-resistance-starts-to-infect-our-courts/91025/

We wonder what the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, makes of that headline about the Ninth United States Circuit Court of Appeals. “Trump has flipped the 9th Circuit — and some new judges are causing a ‘shock wave,’” the headline said. Los Angeles Times attributes the claim to one of the circuit’s own judges. Chief Justice Roberts can’t be happy.

The Chief Justice, remember, was so irked when President Trump laced into “Obama judges” that he issued a rebuke. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Mr. Trump would have none of it. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” Mr. Trump retorted. Obama judges, he added, “have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” The New York Times quoted one law professor, Josh Blackman, as warning the Chief’s statement could “backfire.”

So welcome to the 9th Circuit. The latest is that the judges who heretofore had held sway in the nation’s largest — and most liberal — circuit are now complaining to the press. The judge who says Mr. Trump has “flipped” the 9th Circuit is Milan D. Smith, Jr. He was moved to talk by the fact that Mr. Trump won confirmation of ten new judges to the Ninth Circuit.

That’s more than a third of the circuit and a 40% increase in three years from the seven judge President Obama was able to seat in his entire eight years. LATimes reports that some of the Trump judges “have quickly won the respect of their colleagues.” It quotes one judge, though, as complaining: “Ten new people at once sends a shock wave through the system.”

Los Angeles Times cites unnamed judges as saying that one Trump appointee, Judge Daniel Collins, early on appeared, as the paper paraphrased it, “oblivious to court tradition.” Judge Collins also apparently called for en banc review of five decisions by three-judge panels and allegedly used combative language. Land sakes!

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/24/the-left-dumps-nevertrump/

The love affair between the Left and NeverTrump Right appears to be over. For real, this time.

After working in tandem for four years to try to destroy Donald Trump and everyone in his orbit, NeverTrump and the Left are breaking up in a very public and a very ugly way. And for those of us who’ve been close observers of this twisted political romance, watching their divorce play out is deeply gratifying.

The split couldn’t be happening to a more deserving couple—or dare I say, in honor of former Representative Katie Hill (D-Calif.), a more deserving throuple since it also included a willing canoodler in the corporate media.

But, for now, it looks like they are done brushing each other’s hair and sending late-night boozy texts confessing their mutual lust and loyalty.

NeverTrump is getting the boot for breaching the boundaries of this toxic relationship by daring to opine about the seemingly unstoppable candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Trouble in paradise began when NeverTrump changed the mood music from Orange Man Bad to Crazy Bernie Bad as the commie senator from Vermont began to dominate early Democratic presidential primary contests.

NeverTrump, consisting mostly of Democrats disguised as Trump-hating conservatives so they can keep their gigs on MSNBC and the Washington Post, are encouraging Democratic voters to dump Sanders in favor of a more reasonable Democratic candidate (LOL) who could beat Donald Trump in November.

Now, NeverTrump isn’t exactly known for their inimitable political instincts. In fact, the collection of failed magazine editors, washed-up campaign consultants, and dullards from legacy conservative outlets have been spectacularly wrong about almost everything for the past few decades, but never more so than during the Trump era. Their collective losing streak basically started with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and has continued, nearly uninterrupted, from there.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/richard-grenell-american-hero-under-attack-daniel-greenfield/

President Trump’s new appointee to be the Acting Director of National Intelligence is under vicious attack from the left and from the LGBT Left in particular – a telling fact since no figure in the Trump administration has been a greater champion of equality for gay people.

After the attacks of September 11, the position of the Director of National Intelligence was created to coordinate all of our intelligence agencies against the external terror threat. As the Spygate scandal continues to undermine trust in the intelligence community, the position is more important than ever.

President Trump’s appointment of Richard Grenell as Acting Director has infuriated the Obama veterans and holdovers responsible for Spygate, as well as the LGBT Left.

As Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Grenell successfully led tariff negotiations with German automakers, helped gain subsidies for American energy shipments to Germany, convinced most major German companies to pull out of Iran, closed German airspace to an Iranian airline, stopped $300 million euros in gold and currency from going to Iran, and got Germany to ban Hezbollah.

Coming off this successful winning streak, Grenell is already under vicious attack because his track record shows that he can get things done, and get them done for America. And that’s the last thing that the anti-American Left wants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/harvey-weinstein-verdict-long-prison-sentence-likely/

The former Hollywood power-player is likely to face a long prison sentence despite being acquitted of the most serious charges he faced.

Though a New York State jury convicted Harvey Weinstein on two felony sexual-assault charges Monday, it acquitted him of three allegations of aggravated sexual assault, including the two most serious charges he faced. Still, the counts of conviction are likely to result in a severe prison sentence for the 67-year-old former Hollywood producer.

Weinstein was charged with five offenses, all arising out of two coercive sexual encounters: a 2013 rape of then-aspiring actress Jessica Mann, and forcibly performing oral sex on former production assistant Miriam Haley (professionally known as Mimi Haleyi) in 2006. Before we describe the five counts with more specificity, let’s turn to the two controversial elements of the case, which will make the charges easier to understand:

1. Predatory-sexual-assault charges
Annabella Sciorra, the most famous actress involved in the case, testified that Weinstein raped her about 27 years ago. State prosecutors could not base charges solely on this accusation because it is time-barred under the statute of limitations. Yet they used the Sciorra incident to exacerbate the Mann and Haley encounters into charges of predatory sexual assault (PSA).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/23/neversanders/

In 2020 if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the NeverSanders movement will be far larger, far wealthier, far more influential—even as it is likely far quieter—than were the vociferous but anemic NeverTrumpers of 2016.

Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.

Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.

Those wrinkles from the Republican agenda, in fact, were consistent with traditional conservative values, and thus even among establishment and mainstream Republicans still polled well enough. That reality later was empowered by Trump’s effort to keep his campaign promises, by an economy at near-record employment, and by foreign policy recalibrations that are starting to win grudging, if unspoken, bipartisan support on China, given news coverage of the Hong Kong crackdown, the reeducation camps, the coronavirus debacle, and the Orwellian surveillance state apparat.

Even before Trump’s governance, the NeverTrump Right was emasculated, largely because its pundits and politicians could offer no alternative party agenda superior to Trump’s. Moreover, they had spent much of their lives advocating most of the very policies Trump was advancing, and increasingly was getting results. Nor before or after the election could they ever convince Republicans that Trump’s crassness and uncouth tweets were quite unlike the White House crudity of past presidents (e.g., Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton) rather than in part attributable to the Internet/social media age and the new tabloid media.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/philip-haney-whistleblower-and-happy-warrior-frontpagemagcom/

Joe Martin is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, a graduate of the National Defense University, and served with 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and as a Military Congressional Fellow to the United States Senate Majority Leader. His operational experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela.

We met at a conference here in Washington DC several years ago, and I knew him from his reputation based on the national reporting after he had been a whistleblower to Congress about malfeasance in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration. He struck an appearance like Dr. Emmett Brown and his delivery was not unlike Ben Stein’s economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His appearance, delivery, dry sense of humor and gaiety were disarming, making it deceptively easy to underestimate him. ­­­

An etymologist and self-proclaimed nerd, Phil was relentless in his pursuit of those who were infesting our country and attacking our way of life. Among the enemies this quirky bug hunter pursued were Osama Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation and their offspring – the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) as well as the subversive operatives in the Obama administration… many of whom are still working for the Department of Homeland Security.

 The leaders of those [Muslim Brotherhood] organizations were deliberately and intentionally brought into the [Obama] Administration to help promote and create both domestic and foreign policy and this status continues to this very day.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-cast-a-stone-at-william-barr-11582477289?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Whatever the outcome of a case, then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940, “the government . . . has really won if justice has been done.” It’s worth keeping that truth in mind as we consider the dispute over Attorney General William Barr and Roger Stone.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson last week sentenced Mr. Stone to 40 months in prison—a term within the range Mr. Barr had suggested when he overruled prosecutors who recommended a term of seven to nine years. The attorney general’s move generated accusations that he was doing President Trump’s bidding by showing leniency to Mr. Trump’s friend and former political adviser. It even prompted a petition, signed by more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees, demanding Mr. Barr’s resignation.

Before we address these attacks directly, we think it useful to consider a few data points in Mr. Barr’s recent tenure. Notwithstanding his own skepticism about aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he allowed that probe to run its course. Mr. Barr supported the decision not to prosecute Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. McCabe not only lied when he denied leaking information about an investigation but also berated others for the leak to deflect suspicion from himself.

Mr. Barr has said publicly that he believes Mr. Stone’s prosecution was warranted, and that, given his conviction, so is a prison sentence. And the attorney general has pointedly criticized the president—rightly, in our view—for commenting publicly about cases pending in court and before the Justice Department. That is not the behavior of someone doing the president’s bidding.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fixing-the-fbi-and-cia

Like most of what ails us today, the seeds of the current crisis in republican governance — the severance of Washington’s omnipotent law enforcement and intelligence apparatus from democratic accountability — were sown in the 1960s and ’70s. That was when we began to erase the salient distinction between law and politics. Under the guise of “national security,” we insulated governmental actions and policies from the reckoning of our citizens, whose safety and self-determination hang in the balance.

Fast forward to 2020. The FBI, in its bungling partisanship, very likely swung the 2016 presidential election away from its preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. The sprawling “community” of intelligence agencies (led by the FBI and CIA) covertly used dubious foreign sources to justify monitoring an American political campaign and, later, a U.S. presidential administration. To do so, it invoked daunting foreign-counterintelligence surveillance powers, based on a fever dream that its bête noire, Donald Trump, was an agent of the Kremlin. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently chastised the FBI for feeding it false and unverified information — the secret court apparently calculating that this extraordinary public expression of wrath will divert attention from its own shoddy performance in approving highly intrusive spy warrants based on sensational, blatantly uncorroborated rumor and innuendo.

As usual, Washington is reacting with high-decibel inertia. In an era of hyperpartisanship, Democrats defend the politicization of the law enforcement and intelligence that resulted in the Trump-Russia investigation. Republicans, meanwhile, wail about being victimized — even as the victim-in-chief ham-handedly dabbles in his own mini-version of the abuse: the Ukraine kerfuffle, in which the president sought, however futilely, to leverage the investigative and foreign affairs powers of the executive branch for domestic political advantage.